Design // Multimedia // Illustration

Colin O’Sullivan: STARVED LOVER SINGS covered

Here’s an interesting case history. Svetlana from BeTimes Books needed a quick catalog cover for a new Colin O’Sullivan novel for the Frankfurt Book Fair, and asked me to come up with something. She suggested using a big wave and/or a running man on the cover, so I swiftly put this one together. It’s not all that inspiring, but it’s moody and functional. A little too dark, and clearly an unfinished stab at this project.

We did a few color variations of the same, and then discussed doing a big Hollywood tsunami variant for the catalog cover. Being a fan of (good) disaster flicks (of which there are not many), I dug out some reference photos and made the following mashup, which indeed ended up in the Frankfurt Book Fair catalog. It’s not a great cover, but it grabs your attention and was a blast to make! Of course the book is quirky, literary fiction and not a big tsunami threat thriller…. but the book fair is there to sell the book and for that this did the job.

So some months later Svetlana needed the actual cover, and suggested a more Japanese flavored, j-pop cover with two girls on it. I dug out a nice copy of that classic Hokusai wave and mashed it with the girls and gave it a vivid color scheme, and voila, we quickly ended up with the final cover. It’s still among my personal favorites, and quite different from any other cover I’ve created before or since!